- On My First Sonne
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On My First Sonne, a poem by Ben Jonson, was written in 1616 after the death of Jonson's first son Benjamin at age seven.[1] The poem, a reflection of a father's pain in his young son's death, is rendered more acutely moving when compared with Jonson's other, usually more cynical or mocking, poetry.
- Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
- My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy;
- Seven yeeres tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
- Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
- O, could I loose all father, now. For why
- Will man lament the state he should envie?
- To have so soon scap'd worlds and fleshes rage,
- And, if no other miserie, yet age?
- Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye
- Ben. Johnson his best piece of poetrie.
- For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
- As what he loves may never like too much.
References
AQA Anthology Poems from
Other CulturesCluster 1"Limbo" by Edward Kamau Brathwaite · "Nothing's Changed" by Tatamkhulu Afrika · "Island Man" by Grace Nichols · "Blessing" by Imtiaz Dharker · "Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti · "Night of the Scorpion" by Nissim Ezekiel · "Vultures" by Chinua Achebe · "What Were They Like?" by Denise LevertovCluster 2"Search for My Tongue" by Sujata Bhatt · "Unrelated Incidents" by Tom Leonard · "Half Caste" by John Agard · "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott · "This Room" by Imtiaz Dharker · "Not My Business" by Niyi Osundare · "Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan" by Moniza Alvi · "Hurricane Hits England" by Grace NicholsSeamus Heaney "Storm on the Island" · "Perch" · "Blackberry-Pickin]" · "Death of a Naturalist" · "Digging" · "Mid-Term Break" · "Follower" · "At a Potato Digging"Gillian Clarke "Catrin" · "Baby-sitting" · "Mali" · "A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998" · "The Field Mouse" · "October" · "On the Train" · "Cold Knap Lake"Carol Ann Duffy "Havisham" · "Elvis's Twin Sister" · "Anne Hathaway" · "Salome" · "We Remember Your Childhood Well" · "Before You Were Mine" ·"Education for Leisure"· "Stealing"Simon Armitage "Mother, any distance greater than a single span" · "My father thought it..." · "Homecoming" · "November" · "Kid" · "Those bastards in their mansions" · "I've made out a will; I'm leaving myself" · "Hitcher"Pre-1914 "On My First Sonne" by Ben Jonson · "Song of the Old Mother" by William Butler Yeats · "The Affliction of Margaret" by William Wordsworth · "The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found" by William Blake · "Tichborne's Elegy" by Charles Tichborne · "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy · "Patrolling Barnegat" by Walt Whitman · "Sonnet CXXX" by William Shakespeare · "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning · "The Laboratory" by Robert Browning · "Ulysses" by Alfred Tennyson · "The Village Schoolmaster" by Oliver Goldsmith · "The Eagle" by Alfred Tennyson · "Sonnet" by John ClareProse "Flight" by Doris Lessing · "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit" by Sylvia Plath · "Your Shoes" by Michèle Roberts · "Growing Up" by Joyce Cary · "The End of Something" by Ernest Hemingway · "Chemistry" by Graham Swift · "Snowdrops" by Leslie NorrisThis article related to a poem is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.